inform VS prusti-dev

Inform 7 is the most popular IF engine. The best place to download it in 2023 is from GitHub: https://github.com/ganelson/inform/releases

Releases can currently be found via this link: https://github.com/ganelson/inform/releases

Did you know Inform is now (finally) open source?! https://github.com/ganelson/inform

Inform 6 is still being developed, and Inform 7 went open source earlier this year: https://github.com/ganelson/inform

Here's the github repo, it was just open sourced last week. You can compile it from source now, and I imagine the UI frontends will be updated in a couple of weeks. IIRC, compiling directly to other languages is now possible, although I'm not sure how much that impacts your use case.

For those who don't know it, Inform 7 is the venerable "design system" for interactive fiction. It has been freely available for some time with the promise of a release as open source for some time now. Looks like that has happened.

> The overall goal would be to figure out classical error conditions like nill pointers deference.

> If I can figure out if a pointer will be nil in some execution branch, there is no reason why a computer cannot do the same.

Note, this is called flow-sensitive typing (also called type narrowing) and I think that typescript does it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-sensitive_typing

> I personally would see this as an human race level upgrades. Imagine feeding your code to a CI that spit back something like: "you will have a panic at line 156 when your input is > 4"

A model checker can do that!

See this

https://model-checking.github.io/kani/tutorial-kinds-of-fail...

Other techniques are also possible

https://github.com/viperproject/prusti-dev#quick-example

(Here I could link a lot of things, I just selected two Rust projects to illustrate)

This works better if you are able to provide contracts in your API that says which guarantees you provide. Alternatively, asserts are useful too.

You might be interested in the Prusti project, which statically checks for absence of reachable panics, overflows etc. It also allows user-defined specifications such as pre and post-conditions, loop body invariants, termination checking and so on.

https://github.com/viperproject/prusti-dev

This is called refinement types and prusti might be the project you saw.

But there's also a lot of exciting work around formal verification like Prusti.

prusti

Efforts: seL4, Project Everest, the Prossimo project of the ISRG, Let's Encrypt, and Prusti for the Rust language

Wow that sounds really cool! I'm not an expert but does that mean that one day you could implement dependend types or refinement types in Rust as a crate ? I currently only know of tools like: Flux Creusot Kani Prusti